‘Colonialism and the Desiring Machine’

Robert C. Young's ‘Colonialism and the Desiring Machine’ investigates
those that reside within the borders of blackness, working against a simplistic
East/West reading of Said’s Orientalism, through considering the fearful nature of
crossing ‘racial’ lines in the figures of the 'mulatto' and the 'quadroon'. For the flaw of a binary, first world, third world, model is its
division into colonizer and colonized, the mean, nasty white men against a
defenceless amorphous blob of sad, brown faces. An argument that can helpfully
forget the Ottoman Empire’s own contribution to slavery and the rampant
anti-blackness of the Arab world. As if Palestine erases Darfur, or that crimes
against humanity can be worn like armour deflecting criticism and eschewing
responsibility for the brutalities of their own history. I think of the movie
‘The Last King of Scotland’, which subverts the white saviour narrative by
telling the fictional story of a white doctor’s destructive relationship with
Idi Amin, the president of Uganda. This quote by Amin to the white doctor, is
especially important, contrasting the fantasy of ‘Africa’ with the reality of
Ugandan life under Amin. He says:

“Did you think this was all a game? 'I will go to Africa and I
will play the white man with the natives.' Is that what you thought? We are not
a game, Nicholas. We are real. This room here, it is real. I think your death
will be the first real thing that has happened to you.”

This is not
a free pass for white supremacy. But rather a reminder that homogenous categories
such as the ‘East’, ‘blackness’, ‘people of color’ and ‘the third world’ fail
to recognise more intricate power structures at play. We cannot ‘undo’
colonialism and the scars of white oppression run too deep to declare this
world as post-racial, post-colonial. However, for white people to even attempt,
to see the inhabitants of the so-called ‘third world’ as human they must
actively work against what the novelist Chimamanda Adichie
describes as “the single story”.

The single story
is a pre-set narrative, which forces a shallow tale of imagined suffering onto
people of color. The single story can be identified in the trope of 'the tragic
mulatto'. Here the mixed race woman is presented as a beautiful freak of nature
whose story always ends in disaster, a rightful punishment for upsetting the
pre-set borders of whiteness. Often she tries to pass as white only to be
discovered, horrific consequences inevitably ensue. This particular film
follows a woman named Bernice living a double life as a white woman named Lila.
The movie culminates in her going into premature labour, giving birth to a
stillborn child, whilst crying out ‘is the baby black?’ to her horrified white
husband.

Here I am reminded of James Baldwin argument in ‘On
Language, Race and The Black Writer’ that “The American idea of racial progress
is measured by how fast I become white.” Whitewashing is certainly an enduring
concept. Illustrated by the fact that the Spanish-Brazilian artist, Modesto
Brocos, put forward this very same argument in 1895, in his painting The Redemption of Ham. The work shows a family lightening their
skin each generation, starting with a dark skinned grandmother, we move to a 'mulatto' daughter who marries a Portuguese man and produces a, seemingly, 'full
white' baby. The grandmother lifts her head and opens her hand, thanking God
that the ‘black stain’ has been lifted from her family.

Yet the
colonised subject can never truly escape the single story through white
passing. Young’s extensive research into racial classification, the one-drop
rule and the quantification of whiteness illustrates this vividly. Raising the
question of how we can escape these rigid binaries and pre-set narratives.

One
model could be through subversive humour, expanding and exaggerating
stereotypes of blackness until they collapse in on themselves, revealing the
constructs of race and third world identity as nothing more than an elaborate grapevine game. We can find these works outside of the confines of
academia and in the world of popular screen culture. The comedy sketches of
Dave Chapelle is a great example of this. Not only is his work enormously
popular (for instance in 2005 his first season DVD became the best selling TV
series of all time). But it is radically critical of the trappings of
African-American history. One skit follows the adventures of the time haters, a
group of well dressed players that travel through time killing icons of white
supremacy from Hitler to a Southern plantation owner. This model reminds us,
not just of the inherently ridiculous nature of racist tropes, but that people
of colour contain more than tragedy, as the poet, Jenny Zhang
argues, “we contain multitudes”.